by MATTHEW TSIEN
President Barack Obama is chipping away at his long list of promises to gay voters but has yet to win the enthusiastic backing of the reliably Democratic voting bloc.
The Obama White House has accomplished more than any other on gay rights, yet has drawn sharp criticism from an unexpected constituency: the same gay activists who backed the president’s election campaign. Instead of the sweeping change gays and lesbians had sought, a piece-by-piece approach has been the administration’s favored strategy, drawing neither serious fire from conservatives nor lavish praise from activists.
Last week the Labor Department announced that it would order businesses to extend unpaid leave for gay workers to care for newborns or loved ones.
This move, coming less than five months before November’s congressional elections, seems likely to incite conservatives and Republicans who stood in lockstep against the Obama administration’s earlier efforts to repeal a ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. It also appears likely to be popular with loyal Democrats and organized labor.
Nevertheless, some gay activists, who long ago stopped giving Obama the benefit of a doubt, will continue not to be satisfied.
Many Washington-based activists believe that gays need far more comprehensive and bolder legislation to achieve the goals these small, mostly symbolic and marginal piecemeal efforts attempt to achieve.
The little things to which the White House pays attention and claims, “to be making so much progress” does not translate into a sense of progress outside of Washington.
Mr. Obama had a long list of accomplishments to tout during last week’s Pride Day meetings with gay and lesbian organizations at the White House, but their reach is limited.
For instance, Obama signed a hate crimes bill into law, expanded benefits for partners of State Department employees and ended the ban on HIV-positive persons from visiting the United States. He referenced families with “two fathers” in his Father’s Day proclamation in June and devoted 38 words of his State of the Union address to repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the ban on gays serving openly in the military. But there remains reason for frustration.
Obama’s campaign pledged to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” yet that goal remains years away. His Justice Department invoked incest in a legal brief defending the traditional definition of marriage, prompting some gay donors last year to boycott the Democratic National Committee. And just last week, a committee at his Health and Human Services Department recommended the nation retain its policy barring gay men from donating blood.
Some of Obama’s gay allies say the small-bore changes are the best activists can hope for despite Democrats controlling the White House, the Senate and the House.
Perhaps the reason why these policy changes are important is because Gay Democrats do not have ironclad LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) majorities in either house of Congress. People wrongly assume that having large Democratic majorities in Congress means that gay-oriented legislative goals will be met. That’s not the case.
Gay constituents are hardly the only members of the Democratic bloc to come up disappointed with this White House . Environmental groups groan as a comprehensive climate bill has languished on the Hill. Organized labor saw its signature legislation, which would make it easier for workers to form unions, go nowhere without the White House’s backing. And women’s groups were in open revolt during the debate over the health care overhaul because of anti-abortion provisions.
It’s small consolation for gay rights activists.
A Gallup poll last month found 70 percent of American favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. That same poll, however, included a reminder: 53 percent opposed legalizing gay marriage. Among that opposition to same-sex marriage are three out of five Black and Hispanic voters — minority groups that gays would like to consider their natural allies, but a voting bloc that is decisively against gay marriage.
Donna Milo: A Republican for Congress
We Can Vote For
Donna Milo is a trans-gender person and a Republican congressional candidate who deserves your vote in the August 24th Florida primary to replace U.S. House of Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Ms. Milo was born a man (today she is a woman) in Castro’sCuba where the omnipresent government controls every aspect of your life as so many Gay Democrats wish Obama would.
Having come from a society where meat, butter, milk, travel, health care and income is rationed, or even denied, Ms. Milo knows that our country is heading in the wrong direction. She sees too much government control of economic behavior and a White House that promotes class warfare and racial conflict on a daily basis. Unlike Europe, which is aggressively moving away from socialism, she opposes our country moving unintelligently toward a system that has already failed in every continent during the last century.
Why would gay people vote for a Republican such as Donna Milo? Well, keep in mind that the GOP has traditionally maintained the loyalty of one out of four gay voters for decades. In fact, over one out of three GLBT voters pulled the lever for 2008 GOP presidential nominee, John McCain.
So ,even before you read this article, realize that many gays are predisposed to vote for Ms. Milo. In fact, Ms. Milo had supporters marching in the recent Gay Pride Parade, including the immediate past Chairman of the Broward Republican Party, along with his wife.
During her many debates with her two worthy opponents, Ms. Milo performs exceptionally well and has drawn a following of Gay Republican men and woman, along with straight Latinos.
On a variety of salient issues she comes across as cerebral, poised and cogent:
She opposes a ban on off-shore oil drilling in the Gulf as it would mostly benefit other countries who would continue drilling near our shores: China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, and Vietnam. In her mind such a ban would cost far too many Floridians their jobs. She believes in energy independence and supports the Obama Administration’s emphasis on tax credits for American businesses to develop alternative energy such as wind and solar
She supports a low tax, investment-oriented, high employment society and knows that raising taxes would certainly pressure employers to eliminate more jobs. Even some in the Obama Administration agree with Ms. Milo, as do at least three Democratic U.S. Senators who oppose letting the Bush era tax cuts expire.
Her background in developing a successful construction company makes her sensitive to the needs of small business people who are afraid to hire more people, in part due to the Obama Administration’s schemes to raise taxes on employers.
There are already over one million Floridians out of work, and that includes tens of thousands of gay people who have not only lost their employment but also their homes and health care. Milo’s agenda would spur more economic growth and more jobs in Florida.
Some say we can not return to the tax cutting days of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but it was the rebirth of capitalism during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years (Mr. Clinton cut capital gains taxes, as did Jimmy Carter) that inspired the entire globe to ditch socialism and replace it with freer markets. That transition pulled hundreds of millions of people in China, India and Latin America out of poverty and illiteracy. And Donna Milo has the perspicacity to understand how to effectively spread the wealth around far better than the socialists.
Ms. Milo sees serious problems in the Obama health care bill that raises Medicare costs over 20 percent, and that is certainly not good for Gay senior citizens. She also knows that rationing of health care leads to denial of health care; and that not everyone with pre-existing conditions, including HIV/AIDS, is protected when rationing occurs. And she seems to favor a voucher system for people on Medicaid and Medicare to find the best doctors instead of relying on government bureaucrats to do it for you. This would reduce health care costs and maintain patient privacy that Obama-care is taking away.
On the touchy issue of illegal immigration, Ms. Milo is with most Americans and many gay people who believe we need to secure our borders and not make our country a haven for welfare recipients and law breaking interlopers who overwhelm our schools, hospitals and state budgets. Like most Americans, she supports an orderly immigration process that would increase quotas for people who want to come to the United States to invest and to create jobs.
Yes, there are loud mouth, hypocritical Gay bigots who will disparage Ms. Milo for being transgender, but bigots are in every community, including ours.
Nonetheless, if you are a registered Gay Republican, and they are far more than the GLBT community ever prefers to admit, then for the sake of bringing back jobs and eliminating corrupt institutionalized wasteful spending in the trillions, vote for Donna Milo for Congress this Aug 24th. She will make the Gay community proud, and she understands that while we all should be proud to be Americans and pay our fair share of taxes, she knows that we could be just as proud for half the price.
Milo, Milo…it’s off to vote we go.